Over and over again it has been demonstrated that the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts, that good people from diverse fields working together can make major scientific discoveries that are denied geniuses working in isolation.”
— Alvin M. Weinberg, 1967
Light
The visible reminder of Invisible Light.
T.S. Elliot’s poem the rock, about x-ray spectroscopy
Kurt Vonnegut address to the APS, trascription curtesy Panagiota Papakonstantinou
ADDRESS TO THE APS.pdf (135.8 KB)
Younger scientists are extremely sensitive to the moral implications of all they do. My fictitious old-time scientist asked, among other things, this question: “What is sin?” He asked that question mockingly as though the concept of sin were as obsolete as plate armor. Young scientists, it seems to me, are fascinated by the idea of sin. They perceive it as anything
human that seriously threatens the planet and the life thereon.
[…]
If Professor Norwood really is a humanistic physicist, then he is exactly my idea of what a virtuous physicist should be. A virtuous physicist is a humanistic physicist. Being a humanistic physicist, incidentally, is a good way to get two Nobel Prizes instead of one. What does a humanistic physicist do? Why, he watches people, listens to them, thinks about them, wishes them and their planet well. He wouldn’t knowingly hurt people. He wouldn’t knowingly
help politicians or soldiers hurt people. If he comes across a technique that would obviously hurt people, he keeps it to himself. He knows that a scientist can be an accessory to murder most foul. That’s simple enough, surely. That’s surely clear.[…]
I don’t find this particularly congenial, moralizing up here. Moralizing hasn’t really been my style up to now. But people, university people in particular, seem to be demanding more and more that persons who lecture to them put morals at the end of their lectures.This letter helped me to see that Dr. Fieser and other old-fashioned scientists like him were and are as innocent as Adam and Eve. There was nothing at all sinful in Dr. Fieser’s creation of napalm. Scientists will never be so innocent again. Any young scientist, by contrast, when asked by the military to create a terror weapon on the order of napalm, is bound to suspect that he may be committing modern sin. God bless him for that.
geology looks like so much fun.
looking for light summer socks in a 12-14 size and not from Amazon.
really hard to find!
socks are … really pricy from almost all distributors
Flagship Crew White 3-Pack | Outway Performance Socks – OUTWAY
at least they have many sizes
https://research.owlfolio.org/pubs/2025-pyext-ctrlc-talk/#/17
so good
oh, and:
The NSF budget request has a 56.9% reduction in discretionary spending, from $9.06 billion in the FY24 operating plan to $3.9 billion in FY26. At the agency-wide level, the research grant success rate is projected to drop from 24% (estimated for FY24) to 6% in FY26. The agency also provides forecasts of the number of people at various career stages involved in NSF activities, with an overall reduction from 330,100 people estimated to be involved in FY24 to just 90,000 in FY26. This includes a 72% decrease at the senior researcher level, a 82% decrease at the postdoc level, a 70% decrease in graduate students, a 79% decrease in undergraduate students, and 81% and 69% decreases in PreK-12 teachers and students respectively.
NICER
Net neutrality goes the other way as well.
But also, when Myanmar’s government opens up to two foreign telecom services, the stronger of the two, Norway’s Telenor, “zero-rates” Facebook.9 Essentially, zero-rating is a selective subsidy; it means that customers won’t be charged for the data they use for some parts of the internet, but would be charged for others. For all of Telenor’s customers, using Facebook is free.
Someone posted that even a nanogram of beryllium can be carcinogenic. 50 nanograms
The mechanism of berillium poisoning seems to be super interesting and an open question.
The main source of beryllium in the atmosphere, responsible for emissions of about 200 tons/year and 95% of all atmospheric beryllium, is the combustion of fossil fuels, especially coal. Beryllium enters water in wastewater from iron and steel as well as non-ferrous industries.
here’s what I learned from my disruption. First, I needed to not believe my gut feelings and I needed to believe my doctor. I needed to do things to create stability in my life. That helped me imagine the future better. I needed to find routines that were livable and enjoyable inside of my new normal, and I needed to rely on other people and accept their help when I needed it. *I needed to let myself be weak in the moments when I couldn’t be strong and I needed to let myself be strong in the moments when I could. *
